KINGDOM OF THE STONE -- a Wattpad featured novel

Chapter One

Kingdom of the Stone

J. A. Partridge

© 2009, 2015, J. A. Partridge  All rights reserved

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ISBN-13: 978-1442142831

ISBN-10: 1442142839

Also by J. A Partridge

The Chronicles of the First Age

Kingdom of the Stone
The Stone King
Kingdom of Shadow (Coming Soon)

Other Works

Always and Forever: A Tanabata Story
Colony of the Dead
The Ascent
Wars of the Magearchy

For more information visit:

www.JAPartridge.com

Kingdom of the Stone

Chapter One

Six days before the spring equinox, nearly a sennight before the feast of the greening, Karux died at the foot of the sacred mountain Archetor.

Karux, his cousins Theris and Macander, and all the young men of their tribe who had come of age that year had spent the previous day tramping along the dusty trails of that most sacred mountain from which the first man had descended and up which the last man would one day ascend. Their fathers trudged along behind, urging the boys not to run too far ahead as the excited youths sang and danced their way up the steep ground.

"Ai! Karux!" Theris called out. "Do you know what I will do?"

"What?" Karux twirled his self-made spear of fire-hardened thornwood. The flint spearhead grazed his cheek just below his right eye. He touched the spot and checked his fingers for blood.

Theris grinned. "I shall catch the largest stag anyone has ever seen! I will roast it for my dinner and bring its antlers home to hang over my father's door."

"Ha!" Karux gave him a shove. "Tomorrow you will dine on nothing but moss and roots. You will sleep no more than a stone's throw from camp and come slinking back at first light to beg for leftover scraps."

"When you see me two days hence, you will call me Theris the great hunter and plead for a piece of meat. If you beg my pardon, maybe I'll toss you a bone whose marrow you may suck."

Karux thrust his spear between Theris' feet, nearly catching an ankle. Theris hopped over it and swung his spear at Karux's head. Karux blocked it and crowed his victory.

"Enough, you two! Those aren't practice staves," Naipho, Theris' father called out from down the line. "End it now or I shall thump your thick heads with them."

Karux and Theris shouldered their spears and fell into step sniggering.

As the day warmed and the path steepened, conversation lagged leaving only the shuffling of feet and the gasping of thirsty boys. During a pause on the edge of a high cliff to rest and drink from their waterskins, Karux looked out over the headwaters of the Pardos. A line of trees stretched across the western horizon marking, he thought, the edge of the distant Burat River. He knew the land between the two rivers ran southwards to the ocean and he turned in that direction hoping to catch a faint gleam of water on the horizon.

"Adra? When will we get to the sacred mountain?" Macander asked Naipho.

"We're already there; at least we're on the shoulders of the mountain."